of military intervention was required, U.S. forces wowd be well situated. James Dob- bins, the Bush Administration's special envoy for Mghanistan, told me that in the prewar planning for Iraq "there was an in- tention that the U.S. wowd retain troops in Iraq-not for Iraq stabilization, be- cause that was thought not to be needed, but for coercive diplomacy in the region. Meaning Iran and Syria." Those who were keen on the Chalabi model-that is, an exile who cowd sup- posedly organize and unify the opposi- tion-were looking at Iran through that prism, too. Conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Washington Institute on Near East Pol- icy "have been looking for a Chalabi," ac- cording to Gary Sick, who was the princi- pal White House aide for Iran during the Iranian revolution and is now a professor at Columbia University. Sick listed pro- spective Chalabis who have visited one or both of the institutions over the past sev- eral years: Reza Pahlavi; Hussein Kho- meini, the grandson of Ayatollah Ruhol- lah Khomeini; and Mohsen Sazegara, one of the founders of Iran's Revolution- ary Guard Corps. Sazegara leaped briefly to the forefront of the referendum move- ment in the fall of2004, in London. Pat- rick Clawson, a prominent Washington hard-liner, brought him to the Wash- ington Institute, where he is the research director. The institute is well connected within the Administration and has close ties to the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, and Sazegara has been criticized by others in the opposition for his association with it. "Patrick and the Washington Institute have been run- ning screen tests," Sick continued. "What do you think of this guy, wowdn't he be good?' They take them to the Council on Foreign Relations to speak, and get their papers published. But, so far, nobody has passed the test." Many who have known PaWavi over the years were surprised that, for a time, he seemed to come close to passing it. Al- though Reza was crowned king in Cairo, following his father's death, in 1980, and his mother, Farah PaWavi, who lives in Washington and Paris, refers to him in formal settings as "Your Majesty," he did not seem like a man who wowd risk ev- erything to regain his throne. Vali Nasr, an Iranian-born political-science profes- sor at the Naval Postgraduate School, . ._- ,. : t I \ : . :- ' /i , t; · I If \ Ii; . , !/; ,.--- -------- -------= ---=: '^ f, -== SIPJ2f-ÇS "Our dream is to live long enough to see the end of our renovation. " . whose father was counsellor to <2geen Farah, said, "I knew him when we were young. Hè s very nice-but he is not per- ceived by Iranians to be regal. And he wants to be brought back." In 1986, when PaWavi was twenty-five, he married an- other Iranian expatriate, seventeen-year- old Yasmine Etemad-Amini, whose par- ents had fled to the U.S. at the time of the revolution. Reza and Yasmine lived in a Washington suburb with their three daughters. PaWavi had C.I.A. funding for a number of years in the eighties, but it ended after the Iran-Contra scandal. An Iranian-American who knows him well told me a story that had made the rounds in Iranian expatriate circles: "Reza was shopping in Nordstrom's, buying plates. A Persian woman came up to him, and said, in Persian, 'I should shatter these plates over your head! Why are you here, shopping, when you showd be saving our ",\'" countryr T he student riots in Tehran in the summer of 1999 were momentous for Iran. President Khatamî s liberalizing rhetoric in the previous few years had cre- ated an atmosphere in which the press and pro-democracy activists felt some- what unbound; the press was freer than at any other time in the history of the Is- lamic Republic, and banned political par- . ties began to regroup. In the fall of 1998, however, two pro-democracy dissidents and three writers were murdered by agents of the regime. The public outcry was so sharp that regime officials condemned the murders, and a cabinet minister was re- placed; but after a bill limiting press free- doms was provisionally passed by the par- liament, and a leading reformist newspaper was shut down by the judiciary, students at Tehran University protested, with chants for "democracy," "civil society," and "the rule of law." The government's para- military groups attacked them, and the carnage triggered riots throughout Teh- ran and in many other cities. The turmoil was the first serious challenge to the cler- ics, and might well have signalled the start of another revolution. Instead, President Khatami bowed to Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and denounced the protesters. More than a thousand were imprisoned. "Eastern Europe was the model that influenced U.S. perceptions of Iran, and in the 1999-2003 period there was some intellectual legitimacy to that," an Iran specialist said. "It looked as though the opposition wowd be able to unite and find its voice-as though something might be possible. What were generally called reformers ran the gamut from mod- erate clergy to folks who wanted to reduce the authority of the Supreme Leader to THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 6, 2006 51